Building the “See Something, Say Something” AI for Every Camera

Founding Vision & Personal Motivation

• 💡 The CEO, Shikhar Shrestha, was a victim of an armed robbery at age 12, which sparked his mission to make every camera intelligent after realizing no one was watching a security camera during the incident.
• 🎯 Ambient's core mission is to prevent physical security incidents from happening by transforming existing cameras into smart, proactive monitoring systems.
• 🧠 The initial inspiration came from early image captioning models in 2016, foreseeing AI's ability to understand images and videos better than humans.

AI's Role in Physical Security

• 🔑 AI enables cameras to act as a "see something, say something" node, detecting suspicious precursor behavior before an incident escalates.
• 🚀 Ambient's AI capabilities span prevention, real-time response, and forensics, allowing for immediate action and efficient investigation of past incidents.
• ⚡ The advent of Generative AI and Vision Language Models (VLMs) significantly enhanced AI's reasoning ability, allowing it to understand context and differentiate between benign and suspicious activities.

Ambient's Technology & Approach

• 🔬 Ambient developed its own reasoning VLM called Pulsar, optimized for security camera feeds, making it 50 times more compute-efficient and outperforming public models on this specific problem.
• ✅ The company adopts a privacy-aware approach, focusing on detecting suspicious actions and behaviors rather than using facial recognition or identifying individuals.
• 🛠️ Ambient integrates a human-in-the-loop 24/7 operation to review low-confidence AI alerts, which also serves as a crucial source of training data for continuous model improvement.

Business Evolution & Market Strategy

• 📈 Ambient primarily targets large enterprises such as corporate campuses, hospitals, data centers, and critical infrastructure, where the need for complex security solutions is most magnified.
• 🏡 The product is software that integrates with existing physical infrastructure (cameras, access systems), providing a plug-and-play solution for automation and incident prevention.
• 💬 Navigating challenges like COVID-19 involved repositioning the product to active verticals and accelerated the trend towards cloud-based, remote monitoring solutions in physical security.

Future of Agentic Security

• 🔮 The future of physical security involves AI not just detecting threats, but also performing assessment and automated response, suggesting and executing steps like locking down buildings or calling law enforcement.
• ⏱️ This agentic approach is crucial because seconds matter in preventing incidents, and AI can execute complex workflows more reliably and quickly than human operators in crisis moments.
• 🌐 Ambient's system can connect various data points, from license plate detection to access control events, to provide end-to-end investigation and proactive threat detection across an entire site.